Nineteenth Century American Art- Genre Painting

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) The Painter’s Triumph 1838.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, genre painting emerged as an artistic movement that swept through the country while America struggled to define its national identity. Personally, I consider genre scenes to be some of the most powerful testaments to an artist’s ability. The everyday moments that often pass unnoticed are skillfully transformed by the artist’s hand. Once on canvas, depictions of common events become elevated into profoundly meaningful representations of history. – See more at: Metropolitan Museum: American Scenes of Everyday Life. 1840-1910.

In her seminal work, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life, Elisabeth Johns, like Sarah Burns in Painting the Darkside probes beneath the generalizations of its ‘everyday blissfulness’ to uncover a darker, more conflicted connection to the American character thirty years before the Civil War , a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings—of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk—served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation—arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time.

Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, Eastman Johnson,and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices—and not a blissful celebration of American democracy—that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

Analyzing works of various antebellum artists, Johns reveals that these paintings did not reflect faith in the common man but rather served to reinforce feelings of superiority among the political and social leaders of America before the Civil War.

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About

My name is Monsignor Mark Richard Lane, a Roman Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia. I have been teaching courses in Theology and Art for over thirty years. The Church has, from its foundations, used the language of the symbol to draw us to a deeper level of understanding the faith. Symbolism,for the person of faith, is a largely forgotten language. Secular art, as well, speaks symbolically.
I am also a photographer and through my page "To See The World.." I wish to present through photography the beauty God and God's creation in another media.